Kobzieva O. Judge's Strategies and Tactics in American Courtroom Discourse

The object matter of the research comprises utterances of American judges in court proceedings, the subject matter being their strategies and tactics as well as parameters of their variation. The study aims at establishing the set of global, local, and speech strategies and tactics of the judge in American court proceedings and also elucidating regularities of their variation caused by situational factors and the discourse identity of the judge. The methodological basis of the study was the principles of communicative-discoursive analysis; its main methods include: discoursive-strategic, speech act, pragma-semantic. The study is conductive to solving a newresearch task of the present-day linguistics, namely, establishing the interconnection between a communicant's role and his / her discourse strategy as well as shedding light on the role of collective and individual factors in discourse strategy implementation.In its theoretical aspect, the dissertation contributes to expanding scientific knowledge in the areas of discourse studies, communicative linguistics; linguistic pragmatics / speech act theory and conversational analysis, linguistic studies of genre, linguistic studies of identity. The results of the study have an applied value since they can be put to use in the normative courses of Theoretical Grammar of English and General Linguistics, in the optional courses in discourse analysis, communicative linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, linguistic studies of genre and identity, as well as in teaching EFL and translation to law students.